Macadam Dreams

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Overview

A cyclone inexorably sweeps Eliette into her past in this novel about the wayward violence of love and nature in Guadeloupe. In Macadam Dreams the celebrated Creole writer Gisèle Pineau cunningly unveils the two cataclysms that have devastated Eliette’s life: first, the cyclone of 1928, when she was only eight years old, and now, Hurricane Hugo, whose destruction shatters the elaborate defenses the old woman has built around the sorrows and madness of her life in the small, accursed town of Savane Mulet. As ...
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More About This Book

Overview

A cyclone inexorably sweeps Eliette into her past in this novel about the wayward violence of love and nature in Guadeloupe. In Macadam Dreams the celebrated Creole writer Gisèle Pineau cunningly unveils the two cataclysms that have devastated Eliette’s life: first, the cyclone of 1928, when she was only eight years old, and now, Hurricane Hugo, whose destruction shatters the elaborate defenses the old woman has built around the sorrows and madness of her life in the small, accursed town of Savane Mulet. As Hugo unleashes its fury, a final blow frees Eliette’s repressed memories of madness, isolation, and loss, and of the grievous failure of a prophecy that promised her a child. A story of self-discovery, Macadam Dreams speaks eloquently of the violence and poverty endured by women of this island nation—violence every bit as devastating, and seemingly inescapable, as the perpetually returning cyclone. Viewed by many as a canonical author in the Creole movement in Francophone literature, Pineau has created an extraordinary work that is recognized as a masterpiece of French-Caribbean literature.
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Editorial Reviews

The Historical Novels Review

"Macadam Dreams is a finely executed novel rich in details. Brilliant."—Janette King, The Historical Novels Review

— Janette King

Booklist
"Savane Mulet is the nominal landscape of this stream-of-consciousness-influenced novel that inhabits a dreamscape more than any particular town on Guadeloupe in the West Indies. . . . Pineau's liquid flow of images, chronological leaps, and varied points of view add up to a treasurable experience for those who stay with it."—Booklist
The Historical Novels Review - Janette King
"Macadam Dreams is a finely executed novel rich in details. Brilliant."—Janette King, The Historical Novels Review
Read More Show Less

Product Details

  • ISBN-13: 9780803287730
  • Publisher: University of Nebraska Press
  • Publication date: 9/1/2003
  • Pages: 215
  • Product dimensions: 5.50 (w) x 8.50 (h) x 0.47 (d)

Meet the Author

Gisèle Pineau is a psychiatric nurse and novelist living in Guadeloupe. C. Dickson is a translator living in France whose translations include Mohammad Dib’s The Savage Night and J. M. G. Le Clézio’s The Round and Other Cold Hard Facts, both published by the University of Nebraska Press.
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Table of Contents

Preface
Editors' Introduction
Excerpts from Voices in the Darkness 5
Excerpt from Judas Maccabeus: Afterword 54
Blessed Be the Hands ... 61
Selected poems from A Memoir of Love 73
Selected poems from Parting 81
Ascension 87
Death of a Liberal 135
Marriage 145
Roe Deer's Brother 155
The Wadi 157
A Scrap of Time 167
***** 173
A Dog 175
Night of Surrender 179
The Tenth Man 186
Traces 189
A Strange Country 195
Missing Pieces 200
Excerpt from Bread for the Departed 209
A Little Person, a Songless Bird, a Cage, and the World 239
Fatherland 248
Selected poems from Antinostalgia 289
Selected poems from Verses from America 291
Selected poems from Among the Absent 293
Selected poems from A Monument on the Potomac 296
Selected poems from I Draw in Memory 299
Briefly Now 303
The Dybbuk [Fragments] 312
The Armchair 317
Excerpt from How It Really Happened 324
Glossary 343
Acknowledgments 347
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